Posts tagged Rupert Murdoch

Well, there goes the Wall Street Journal again. In a paywalled opinion piece (just Google “All Along the Apple Watchtower” to read it), the Journal once again takes aim at Apple anti-trust monitor Michael Bromwich. The editorial complains, among other things, of Bromwich’s $1,100 per hour fee being too high, that he’s ranging farther afield than his mandate should allow, that he’s in bed with the Justice Department, and, of course, that he’s a close personal friend of Judge Cote. It really is a piece of work. For example, giving Bromwich’s rates in isolation, and the $2.35...

The Charlie Hebdo massacre naturally involves writers, magazines, and publishers everywhere, touching as it does on issues of free speech, free expression, and the right to publish. It also gives those same communities the chance to condemn themselves out of their own mouths. And one Big Five figurehead - no surprise to some, maybe - has gone ahead and done just that.
Yes, it's Rupert Murdoch, whose tweet after the massacre read: "Maybe most Moslems peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible." And he continued, "Big jihadist danger looming everywhere from Philippines...

We learned today that the Rupert Murdoch-owned News Corporation has unveiled a 10-inch Android tablet designed specifically for schoolchildren. Known as the Amplify Tablet (Amplify is also the name of the News Corp's education division), the $299 slate was presented earlier today at the SXSWedu conference in Austin, Texas. Amplify sales reps are said to be currently knocking on the proverbial doors of public schools nationwide.
[caption id="attachment_80850" align="alignright" width="180"] Joel Klein[/caption]
According to a press release:
The Amplify Tablet and related services are being piloted this year in school districts across the country in collaboration with AT&T. Tablets purchased by June 30 will...

As most of you are perfectly well aware, there are a lot of really bad YouTube videos floating around out there online. But occasionally, a video comes along that it so ragingly goofy—embarrassing, even—that you can't help but share it with friends.
To wit: The well-intentioned (yet still cringe-inducing) "Karaoke the News: So Long, Farewell," a sort of 'one-last-hoorah' goodbye video featuring former staffers of The Daily, the News Corp's tablet-only newspaper that regrettably published its final issue today, December 15, 2012. (Scroll down to view the video.)
Of course, for those of us lucky enough to still have jobs in the publishing industry, it's always...

So two of the largest publishers in the world are merging their book arms entirely to deal with "this exciting, fast-moving world of digital books and digital readers," to quote Pearson CEO Marjorie Scardino.
Could there be any clearer proof that e-books are where the action is, and that the print-only model is truly over? What price print Luddism now?
What does everyone else think?...

Under pressure from News Corp’s upper management, Rupert Murdoch has lately agreed to divide News Corp up into two corporations—one that contains the corporation’s entertainment assets, and the other to contain its newspaper and publishing assets—including “Big Six”/”Agency Five” publisher HarperCollins. Murdoch will remain in charge of both new companies. Attempting to put the best spin on it he could, Murdoch said the split would “create the most ambitious, well-capitalized and highly motivated publishing company in the world, consisting of the largest collection of our news and publishing brands, as well as our groundbreaking digital education group”. ...

Harper Collins’ takes a different approach from its competitors in its quest to ripoff Aussie readers. Rather than massively overcharging Australians to prop up their foreign operations, they have gone for a more mixed, global price hike strategy. This does, of course, involve over-charging Australians. But hey, why not take a global stance by overcharging everyone. Not that this should surprise anyone given HarperCollins is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s communications empire.
The price samples below come from an Amazon advanced ebook search by entering Voyager and eliminating the odd (not relevant titles) and books that did not have both Australian and...

Any time you turn on the news, odds are good you will see something about the News Corporation voicemail-hacking scandal which has again exploded onto headlines in the last few days. It stood to reason that sooner or later some corner of it would reach into the e-book world. Yet, strangely enough, it is not something related to Murdoch’s feud with Google or obsession with paywalls. In this case, it comes by way of agent Andrew Wylie, who made a big splash in the publishing world last year with his abortive backlist self-e-publishing operation (which by and large mysteriously...

Ever since Rupert Murdoch's The Times erected a paywall a year ago, observers have been curious about whether it could bring in enough paying readers with such a strict no-free-content policy. This week, AdNews reported that the newspaper "now has 101,036 people signed up to its digital platforms including website, iPad and kindle wireless reading device"—a 28% increase from February's tally of 79,000.
This time last year, there were reports that nobody was going past the registration page (not even print subscribers with free access), with one person guesstimating that less than 30,000 readers had subscribed to the website or the...

On the Huffington Post, Michael Calderone reports that a number of executives have been leaving Rupert Murdoch's iPad newspaper The Daily lately. Latest to go is art director for news Gabriel Dance it, who represents the seventh executive to leave the paper in recent months. However The Daily does not see anything unusual in this number of staffers leaving: "Seven employees turning over out of a staff of more than a hundred in a nine month period sounds perfectly normal to us,” a Daily spokesperson said in an email. “On a personal note, we are...